"That was the last record I bought, basically. It's taking psychedelic rock, some of it's bar room rock playing the same riff over and over again, but something about that repetition turns it into a more psychedelic experience. He kind of sings, but as far I can make out he's not actually singing any words, he's just making these growling sounds. It's got all the ingredients that would be in a Leonard Skynyrd song or something, but just as it becomes too much or is repeated too often, he boils it down to the bare bones of it, and there's something really interesting about that. Again, you can just kind of go off on one. You can tell that there's no smirking involved, you can tell it's the kind of music they like to get into a headspace. It takes you somewhere. 
"

"They're a psychedelic rock band from the early '70s. I didn't know about psychedelic rock when we began, but we were often compared to psych music. To be honest, I was completely ignorant of it. People would use quotes like: ""Mercury Rev is the new Hawkwind."" I had no idea who Hawkwind were! But now, many years later, my girlfriend is introducing me to psych rock from the mid-'60s. Not just stuff like 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' by Iron Butterfly, but also from the esoteric, better defined albums that are wholly obscure. Not only that, but it also has the idea of a concept record and melodrama, flutes and guitars going on. It was strange when I heard Lemmings when we were recording The Light In You and I thought, wow, nothing new under the sun! The moment you think you're onto something original, all you have to do is listen to something from thirty years ago to see someone was onto this all the while back! So it was really stunning to hear this Bachdenkel record from 40 years prior that was attempting or aspiring to something we were in the midst of."

"I think I'd been looking for something like this for ages; something sculpted, but that manages to encompass the violent and everything in between. What I want out of music is everything really, and The Pearl is that. It's quite a dark record in places. It's easy to dismiss it as New Age. I think we're quite lucky at this point in time that people are less concerned about genres than they used to be. Even prog rock is getting a proper analysis now. I finally got around to listening to early Genesis recently and found it wasn't as disgusting as I expected it to be. A lot of music gets dismissed because of how it's tagged. But The Pearl has escaped that really, because of Eno. I was lucky living in St Helens, because it can seem like a bit of a cultural desert, but there were a couple of good resources. There used to be a really good record shop in the market that sold mostly prog rock stuff, but lots of psychedelic stuff, some of Tim Buckley's early stuff and I picked up The Pearl from there. It's amazing."